Sara Harvey is viewing her first Edinburgh Fringe with a degree of trepidation but with resolve, “I’m stubborn,” she says, “It helps me be resilient.” A year ago Sara was in hospital, a mental health institution, and facing a serious danger to her life because of her condition. Now, after winning accolades and awards at both Brighton and Manchester Fringes, she is preparing to perform her show, Neurochatter, in Edinburgh at The Space Surgeon’s Hall. “I didn’t want my life to be defined by one episode in it”, says Sara, “and writing and performance have enabled me to move on. They are part of my recovery.”
Some might argue that it isn’t good for your mental health to perform at the Fringe but Sara has plenty of coping strategies in place, and knows that help is at hand. Health in Mind is a partner of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society and has been commissioned to supply mental health and wellbeing support to artists. Sara also thinks it is important that stories like hers be told. “Mental illness is the same as physical illness – this idea is much more commonly accepted now. Our stories shouldn’t be locked away behind institutional walls and hidden because of prejudices.”
Sara used to love performing when she was at school. Like many children she found not only happiness but a way of escaping a childhood trauma. Sadly as she got older she got hit by stage fright but now, twenty years later, she has found the confidence to act again. She wrote this show as a first timer but is prepared to develop it and improve it based on feedback each time she performs. She knows that she isn’t delivering a lecture about her illness but creating a theatrical event and the awards she has received so far show that she is succeeding.
Sara has a diagnosis of dissociative disorder. Mental health professionals have told her it is a very rare condition (some might commonly call it split personality disorder) but Sara reflects that maybe many more people can relate to what it feels like to be different people in different situations, and finding the need to mask a personality depending on who you are with. “The show introduces three of the voices that chitter chatter inside my head,” Sara tells me. “I recorded myself and then developed the characters, how they move, how they dress, from that.” Sara is keen to rescue the condition from the damaging melodrama of films like Split and Psycho. “My play is my attempt to show the audience what it is really like to live with my condition. People with it aren’t a danger to society. I am not trying to sugarcoat the challenges I have but mental ill health can be managed.”
Neurochatter is also about exploring the damage that some in the psychiatric profession can do to patients; Sara describes the treatment she was encouraged to undertake as making her condition spiral out of control. Now she is studying towards a Masters in Psychology, focusing on neuroscience, but in the meantime she has an Edinburgh Fringe debut to focus on.
